Who are we studying?
The child of the empire is someone for whom the empire, the colonial wars and decolonisation are only a representation, because s/he has no first-hand knowledge of the events nor is s/he the author of first-hand testimony. Rather, the child is the symbolical inheritor of an open wound from which he or she draws up a narrative constructed from fragments of family narratives made up of discourses, snapshots, maps, letters, aerograms and other objects taken from the private domain and also from fragments drawn from public narratives.
Our informants never knew first-hand or have only very remote memories from childhood of the dying days of colonialism in the DRC, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. They were not direct witnesses of the decolonization of these nations. However, they were marked by the process through their family histories and the context in which they grew up. To this day, the colonial past influences their worldview in different ways.
Today’s challenge is to fight for the decolonisation of the individual, in the figure of both the ex-colonised and the ex-coloniser, and to promote conditions for a mutually respectful, peaceful dialogue.
